The research, which compares average household gasoline expensesbased on the average number of vehicle miles traveled perhousehold, examines 52 U.S. metropolitan areas across the country -encompassing 60 million households. It also looks at percentage ofhousehold income spent on transportation, number of vehicles perhousehold, transit ridership and other variables on aneighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.

The gas-cost findings are the newest addition to the Housing + TransportationAffordability Index developed by CNT and its collaborativepartner, the Center for Transit Oriented Development (CTOD). Thelatest release of the H + T Index, a project of the BrookingsInstitution's Urban Markets Initiative, is web-based technologythat can take the guesswork out of computing transportation andother costs.

It includes an interactive map, which provides housing andtransportation costs at the neighborhood level for 52 metropolitanareas. It also provides other key characteristics of neighborhoods,including average VMT (vehicle miles traveled), auto ownershiprates, employment density and transit ridership.